How work can be – Stories of agile & lean

13 activities for retrospectives to know

I like all activities in Retr-O-Mat. Of course, I do, otherwise I would not have invested the time to add them. Still, when I selected activities for the Print Edition I realized that some activities HAD to be in it and others were interchangeable.

Which are these key activities, you ask? Well, here they are:

For Teams

Teams new to agile need to learn what to improve, what they can influence and how best to implement change:

Circle of influenceThe team will be most successful if they tackle problems they can influence instead of bitching about things they cannot change

SMART Goals
A concrete, measurable goal / action item has a much higher chance of being implemented than a nebulous one, that no one knows how to act on

Cause-Effect-Diagram
Such a powerful method: I’ve seen it break nasty loops so that teams finally find one end of the problem chain to yank on. IMO more suited for real-life complex problems than 5 Whys.

MergeHaving many action items lowers the chances of any improvement getting implemented. Boiling it down to very few important ones is key and “Merge” does that nicely.

Brainwriting
Written activities are the remedy for teams with silent members